The Solitary House (171 page)

“I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak—and he has been so long gone.”

“Not so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet.”

“But that is a long time. O it is a long time!”

He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her. Therefore, she sits in the darkness for a while, without a word; then gently begins to move about; now stirring the fire, now standing at the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with recovered self-command, “As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light the room!” When it is lighted, and the weather shut out, it is only left to him to listen.

But they find that, however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms, and being sure that everything is ready to receive her. Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him.

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement. Upon this wintry night it is so still, that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before.

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester’s room. As the night lags tardily on—or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o’clock—they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights; the sleet still falling, and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.

Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase—the second turning past the end of the carving and gilding—a cousinly room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester, banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard, planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea—is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as she expresses it, “of anything happening” to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only, and that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world.

An effect of these horrors is, that Volumnia finds she cannot go to bed in her own room, or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost: particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of countenance.

The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling, is an assurance of protection and company, both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times, they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion, and dialogues, not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid.

“How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?” inquires Volumnia, adjusting her cowl over her head.

“Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes.”

“Has he asked for me?” inquires Volumnia tenderly.

“Why, no, I can’t say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to say.”

“This is a truly sad time, Mr. George.”

“It is indeed, miss. Hadn’t you better go to bed?”

“You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock,” quoth the maid, sharply.

But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she may be wanted at a moment’s notice. She never should forgive herself “if anything was to happen” and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester’s); but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a merit of not having “closed an eye”—as if she had twenty or thirty—though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes.

But when it comes to four o’clock, and still the same blank, Volumnia’s constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to strengthen; for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for the morrow, when much may be expected of her; that, in fact, howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So, when the trooper reappears with his, “Hadn’t you better go to bed, miss?” and when the maid protests, more sharply than before, “You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!” she meekly rises and says, “Do with me what you think best!”

Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the house to himself.

There is no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips the thawed snow. It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of the great door—under it, into the corners of the windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies. It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight;
even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost’s Walk, on the stone floor below.

The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur of a great house—no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold—goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm’s length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms, and the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the master of the house upstairs, and of the foreboding “Who will tell him!” he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he
might
see something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank; blank as the darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again; blank as the oppressive silence.

“All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?”

“Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester.”

“No word of any kind?”

The trooper shakes his head.

“No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?”

But he knows there is no such hope as that, and lays his head down without looking for an answer.

Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder of the blank wintry night; and, equally familiar with his unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light, and undraws the curtains at the first late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a death-like hue, as if it cried out, “Look what I am bringing you, who watch there! Who will tell him!”

CHAPTER 59

ESTHER’S NARRATIVE

I
t was three o’clock in the morning when the houses outside London did at last begin to exclude the country, and to close us in with streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had stopped exhausted, halfway up hills, they had been driven through streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard any variation in his cool, “Get on, my lads!”

The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey back, I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at between three and four o’clock in the morning, into Islington.

I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected all this time, that we were leaving my mother farther and farther behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be right, and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following this woman; but I tormented myself with questioning it, and discussing it, during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her, and what could compensate us for this loss of time, were questions also that I could not possibly
dismiss; my mind was quite tortured by long dwelling on such reflections, when we stopped.

We stopped in a high-street, where there was a coach-stand. My companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the carriage itself; and giving them some brief direction where to take it, lifted me out of it, and into a hackneycoach he had chosen from the rest.

“Why, my dear!” he said, as he did this. “How wet you are!”

I had not been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way into the carriage; and I had got out two or three times when a fallen horse was plunging and had to be got up; and the wet had penetrated my dress. I assured him it was no matter; but the driver, who knew him, would not be dissuaded by me from running down the street to his stable, whence he brought an armful of clean dry straw. They shook it out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm and comfortable.

“Now, my dear,” said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window after I was shut up. “We’re a-going to mark this person down. It may take a little time, but you don’t mind that. You’re pretty sure that I’ve got a motive. Ain’t you?”

I little thought what it was—little thought in how short a time I should understand it better; but I assured him that I had confidence in him.

“So you may have, my dear,” he returned. “And I tell you what! If you only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you, after what I’ve experienced of you, that’ll do. Lord! you’re no trouble at all. I never see a young woman in any station of society—and I’ve seen many elevated ones too—conduct herself like you have conducted yourself, since you was called out of your bed. You’re a pattern, you know, that’s what you are,” said Mr. Bucket, warmly; “you’re a pattern.”

I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no hindrance to him; and that I hoped I should be none now.

“My dear,” he returned, “when a young lady is as mild as she’s game, and as game as she’s mild, that’s all I ask, and more than I expect. She then becomes a Queen, and that’s about what you are yourself.”

With these encouraging words—they really were encouraging to me under those lonely and anxious circumstances—he got upon the box, and we once more drove away. Where we drove, I neither knew then, nor have ever known since; but we appeared to seek out the narrowest and worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him directing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a deeper complication of such streets, and we never failed to do so.

Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare, or came to a larger building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down by an archway, or at a street corner, and mysteriously show the light of his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within narrower and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know, and point to him where to go. At last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one of these men, which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner of nodding from time to time. When it was finished he came to me, looking very busy and very attentive.